One of the pleasures in contributing to CC is dong the research for a feature, and discovering something like this. Just as Paul Niedermeyer found the fascinating Rampside Classic Boeing 707 last month, whilst researching the background for the Bristol 411 feature, I came across several photographs of the Silver City Bristol Freighters and Superfreighters operated by Silver City Airways. In the case above, the car is a Ford Zephyr convertible, from 1957-1963, being loaded into a Superfreighter.

This is the photo that first caught my eye – a Bristol 401 being loaded into a Bristol Freighter. You will have identified that the Freighter and Superfreighter were not, visually, a match for Bristol’s most famous post-war design – Concorde.

Silver City Airways was an independent (that is, not part of the nationally owned BOAC or BEA) airline who operated a car ferry service from Lympe near Dover on the south east tip of England, to Le Touquet on the northern French coast. The flight took around 20 minutes, compared with 2 hours by ferry.

The Freighter was built by the Bristol Aircraft Company, was known officially as the Type 170 and first flew in 1945. It had twin radial Bristol Hercules engines, a fixed undercarriage aircraft and a simple rugged design whose main feature was a large, uninterrupted cargo hold, accessible through clamshell doors opening at the front, below the cockpit, which is raised above the cargo deck, 747 style. The aircraft was unpressurised, so there was some internal turbulence and the flights to France were made at around 1000ft. The Superfreighter was the longer version, easily spotted by the full height clamshell loading doors.

Silver Wings made its first car ferry flight in 1948, and in 1953 leased the larger Mk32 or Superfreighter version, which was configured to take 3 cars and 20 passengers. This allowed Silver City to expand operations to include other routes from southern England to France, to Belgium and Ireland, and in 1955 built a dedicated airport terminal and runway at Lydd, known as Fewrryfield, in Kent, south east of London, that handled over 250,000 passengers a year. At the peak, Silver City were making over 200 ferry flights a day across the English Channel at around £25 a car and 4 passengers.

the Duke Of Edinburgh officially opened Ferryfield in 1956, and allegedly took the controls on the flight to Le Touquet. This excitement seemingly reduced Pathe news reel to silence.

Competition increased as high capacity roll on/roll off ferries and faster hovercraft services could successfully compete on price, speed and comfort in the 1950s and early 1960s. At the same time, the Bristol Superfreighters were exhibiting signs of metal fatigue and there were no replacement aircraft available. Silver City, now part of the larger British United Airlines group, closed the car ferry services at the end of 1962.

But these photographs remain, and personally I find them quite evocative of a time when travel with your car to the European continent was a significantly more dramatic and adventurous enterprise than it is now.

You can confirm that, just by the fact that Airfix did a model of the Superfreighter.

Guys and gurls i can give you some firsthand information on these old ladies of the air… take-off power was 2200 rpm ..cruise power was 1800 rpm ..getting the C of G more or less ‘spot-on’ for each and every individual flight (unless empty) was crucial ..unless you wanted a good ‘porpoising’ on landing which could become a problem on a shorter landing strip (surprisingly from the ultra stout appearance, those thick wings were actually extremely ‘flexible’ upon porpoising and could be observed flapping up and down like a pair of gigantic albatross wings. .
..engine starts were always interesting due to the unavoidability of some quantity of raw avgas emerging from the lower cylinders in the proximity of exhaust flame …so a chap with a primed fire extinguisher always stood by to put any engine fire out immediately. .
..nice things to fly ..very lonnng control yoke movement fore and aft due to the pulley gearing ..porpoising on landing meant a lot of extended arm exercise with each touchdown and rebounce

This was an expensive way to cross the channel, 2 – 3 weeks pay for a car and passengers. Was this £ 25 each way I wonder ?
I remember reading that when a Lotus Elite belonging to one of the Team Lotus drivers crossed this way, with the wheels firmly lashed down for security, there was some turbulence and the fixed-length driveshafts pulled out of the differential.
In my youth I did have the Airfix model of the Freighter, but I blew it up for entertainment….

In the mid 1980’s,when I lived in Wellington, I would hear the wonderful sound of the engines thrump in and out of sync as the Bristol Freighter circled the harbor before heading to the Chatham Islands.

Had the old Airfix kit when I was a child (mid-’60s), since donated to an aircraft modelling enthusiast for restoration. Great fun loading it with Matchbox cars. I’m sure somewhere in the family photos there’s a Superfreighter, probably at Lydd. Mind there’s a lot of them to go through, so it may take a while to find.

After the first three (Zephyr, Bristol, Sprite) the other cars from what I can tell are: Hillman Minx convertible, Humber Sceptre, Austin Healey 100 (or 3000), Riley RM sedan, and Hillman Husky on the Airfix model box.

Great article Roger, I definitely agree about the more dramatic and adventurous part, going by train or conventional ship is so much less ‘exceptional’. A hovercraft is getting closer, so too to some extent the Seacat/Incat high-speed catamarans.

that’s right.. and quite a smooth engine for a big radial ..they made good power ..it was a shortage of certificated engines that caused them to come out of the air ..Safe Air (in NZ) where having to resort to buying Spanish engines to keep the last example flying circa 1985/86

I’ve always been fascinated by the Bristol Freighter after seeing my first in the mid 1980s. It was on display at the Waihi Beach airfield in New Zealand for several years. Such spectacularly bulbous styling! The one below (which I think is actually the Waihi Beach one) is a few kilometres from my house, and serves as accomodation at Woodlyn Park motel (which also offers accomodation inside a tug boat, train carriages and hobbit houses):

Being a long time aviation fan; I was surprised that I had never heard of these 170s; so looked it up and after some reading was struck by the appalling number of crashes over the 40 or so years of service; apparently the British car failure rate migrated to these planes.
A lot of the wrecks were caused by metal fatigue, cables coming on done (one, the parking break cable snapped, causing the plane to fall in to a ditch, totaling it) and wings and tail sections falling off. one of the funny bang-ups happened when two pilots were doing single engine failure landings and crashed their plane when they shut off both engines, oops! Luckily they survived; a lot of crews didn’t, sorry to say.

These planes sort of remind me of the C123 Provider by Fairchild that we used as transport around the mountains of South Vietnam in the 60s, only they had a rear cargo bay door, altho it didn’t help with the wind and noise as was stated with the Bristol, you couldn’t hear somebody yelling in your ear, those 2 Pratt & Whitney R2800s sounded like somebody with a jack hammer on a dumpster while your inside!
Thanks Roger for a trip down memory sky lane.

R-2800 was IMHO the greatest radial engine ever, see the number of successful types using it. Now radials could be awfully noisy, but still not as bad as V12s (e.g. Canadair Northstar).

I have a theory about British aircraft; from what I can tell, they didn’t pay enough attention to systems engineering, even though at times they had a superior performance envelope. Thus higher operational costs than “cruder” American types, I suspect because they were spec’d according to the whims of state-run airlines who, in classic treachery, often turned around & bought American instead, hence the gag acronym for BOAC was “Buy Only American Crap.”

Example: the VC-10 was technically more sophisticated (e.g. automated landing system) than the 707 & preferred by passengers, but cost more to fly & never posed a serious market threat.

European aero engineering did possess inspirational ‘flair’ (ie: the Comet, and the Concorde) but basic engineering oversights brought them down (ie: ‘square’ window ports that developed right-angled metal fatigue in five minutes, and non-armored/non-self-sealing fuel tanks that once ruptured even ever so slightly, spelt inevitable catastrophe). .

Having said that didn’t the ubiquitous Boeing 737 have an inbuilt tail rudder actuator system design failure that brought a number spiraling down before it was recognized and remedied by Boeing. .

The 707 also had Dutch Roll problems, which they solved with a damper system.

Re the Comet disaster, I think the problem was NOT that metal fatique was a new science (as many documentaries claim), it was that deHavilland, as experts at wood construction, had no experience with pressurized all-metal fuselages like American makers had since before WW2. By the time of the Comet’s Court of Inquiry, the 367-80 was completed, yet there’s no evidence Boeing had to go back to the drawing board using its conclusions; they already understood the problem.

I conclude that the British needed to save face & pretend the window failures were a totally unexpected phenomenon, and that Boeing, Douglas, et al, not wanting to cause a scandal that could hurt everyone, were too polite to say otherwise.

My understanding of the 737 rudder failures were reported to be caused by a cpu malfunction of a Parker Hannifin servo unit. The NTS committee could not find any reason to blame the cpu, as all evidence was destroyed in the crashes. The NTS board thought it was pilot error; when all else fails, and the poor pilots are not around to defend themselves, blame them. The FAA sided with caution and had all the 737’s upgraded; so now the story is etched in concrete that it was mechanical failure. That being said, I don’t know if you would want your steering on your new car controlled by a cpu; oh wait, they do have electronic streeing now; I hope there is still a mechanical link to the front tires.

The v12 on the Canadian Northstar, being water cooled, I assume, would be quieter them a rotary, it’s just hard to imagine a louder engine then the 2800; especially when they would use the jato take-off helper engines, just when you think it couldn’t get any louder; it does.

Neil

Posted January 23, 2015 at 6:13 AM

I think the noise had to do with exhaust routing; one Northstar was re-engined with R-2800s. I’m just going on published accounts. The Merlin seemed much more efficient than radials; most types using it had excellent range & speed. Even the Allison-powered XB-38 (modified B-17E) was considerably faster than the baseline.

Aircraft software, unlike automotive, has to be FAA-certified, so that should give one a •little• more confidence in trusting one’s hide to digital avionics. But Murphy is always lurking; software fails in amazing ways, e.g. the 2004 Camry I-4 sudden-acceleration was blamed by investigators on stack overflow due to recursion, in violation of Toyota’s own coding standards.

tmt

Posted January 23, 2015 at 9:48 PM

Yes I think your right on the exhaust routing; the c123’s I heard were no louder on the outside when taking off then other radials I’ve heard at airshows and overseas years ago. What was loud was inside; the 2800 had 18 cylinders and they made the aluminum hull vibrate like a paint mixer. and it did no good covering your ears or to use the ear plugs they would issue, as the sound came up thru the sear and would vibrate your bones, probably why my ears are still ringing today.
It’s a wonder if any of them ww2 pilots could hear anything after a few mission, let alone hundreds like some did.

Neil

Posted January 24, 2015 at 3:22 AM

Indeed, when I flew on a vintage Collings Foundation B-25 (R-2600s), it was incredibly noisy; we had to wear ear protection. I later learned that veteran pilots often suffered hearing loss!

Records show that our 1953 Bentley flew from Lympe to Le Touquet in Sept. of 1953. We are still researching if it were being transported for a private individual, to attend the concours in Le Touquet, or to a new owner.